Jared is one of the best angels I've ever worked with and he's been high value add for Zesty, having invested in us before we even got into YC. Stoked for both YC and Jared!
340 karma · joined November 15, 2007
If you're too strict, employees think you're unfair and they get depressed. If you treat them too leniently and are too friendly, they'll like you but the company's performance will suffer.
The best founders prioritise performance and being respected, but create structure and goals that avoid people feeling like they're being treated unfairly.
A recent David Sacks tweet claiming this got a lot of attention: "Why Uber/Lyft market is so much bigger than people think: it's not a substitute for cabs, it's a substitute for driving." https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/378305832602980353
Having spent 2007-2012 doing a startup in London and the past year doing a startup in Silicon Valley, I've experienced both sides. I also had Silicon Valley investors in the first startup and spent time here every year since 2007.
London is catching up in some areas and you have to break the question down to make it useful. I'd look at the following areas that make Silicon Valley what it is:
Funding
- Not much difference in availability of investors but you'll get roughly double the amount of capital at double the valuation at each stage in Silicon Valley.
- Reason for similar availability is that there is at least an order of magnitude more investors at seed/early stages in Silicon Valley but a similar proportion more startups.
- At seed/early stage, Silicon Valley investors have higher expectations for growth and London investors have higher expectations for business model validation.
- Silicon Valley was much further ahead 5 years ago due to fewer investors in London and fewer startups in Silicon Valley.
- In London the tax incentives for seed investing and VC firms started by successful entrepreneurs (Atomico, Notion, ProFounders etc.) are changing this.
- In Silicon Valley, YC and its copycats are creating more high quality startups.
- At later stages, investors are still almost all American but they are comfortable investing across the pond by then.
Talent
- Proportionally more top people in Silicon Valley than in London across all functions.
- You'll pay 50-70% of the salary for people of an equivalent level in Silicon Valley and the cost of living is similar to London.
- Hiring is an order of magnitude less competitive in London than in Silicon Valley.
Acquirers
- Silicon Valley is dramatically better. London has no talent acquisition market and because all the active large acquirers are in Silicon Valley, they prefer local deals. This feeds all the way down to early-stage valuations which need to be so low in order to tie up with the poor exit market in London.
Ambition and role models
- One of the biggest differences. Mentality of being best in the world is far more ubiquitous in Silicon Valley than London.
- This has serious implications for you as a founder as your ambition levels are heavily influenced by the people you surround yourself with.
Accessibility of a large market
- Most billion dollar addressable markets you can target are mainly composed of the US market.
- For cultural reasons on the consumer side and relationship-building reasons in B2B, it's much easier to win the large markets when starting in Silicon Valley.
Overall London is catching up and one $10B+ success story will accelerate closing of the gap, but there are some structural reasons that mean there's always likely to be gap.
I wrote a guest post discussing the growth of London a couple of years ago, and things have continued in the same direction since: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/the-european-startup-ecosys...
Trying to spot an allergy also won't require the level of detail of MyFitnessPal/similar so I like the stripped down interface.
It's broken down into countries: UK, US etc.
Front page of US (http://us.intruders.tv) has interviews with Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, Evan Williams amongst other big names.
Surely any would-be entrepreneur is better off investing 2 years and $100k in starting a company?
[...] If you want to close your funding sooner, take your valuation down a notch and give your investors 'a great deal.' This means selling me one-third of your company for $500,000, which is still a smart, $1 million pre-money valuation."
What percentage discount on pre-money valuation is generally given to really smart money [read: ideal investor(s)] vs totally dumb money?
I've been surprised at some of the readings as well.
I don't believe there's a right answer to this. Surely the answer is always "it depends". And what it depends on is the interesting part of this whole debate.
Has anyone used any of these in-email text advertising networks? If so, what scenarios did/didn't they work well in?
I find it interesting that a company's leadership appears to be valued just like this by people inside the company, but that people outside the company often value it in the opposite way.
It's quite high up on my current list of "Books to read".
Unfortunately I'm not a 24 watcher so can't relate to Jack Bauer (yet); maybe I'll watch an episode or two now :)
My question is more about how to identify the appropriate drivers for making specific decisions when there are too many unknown variables in play to come up with a conclusion through logical analysis.
"something real" could also be "something you don't know and may not exist" so I don't quite see how that answers the question. Could you give an example to articulate what you mean?
Ironically, this particular post has an onomatopoeic ring to it - the content within the post is about as organised as the content being described.
That said - I'm curious to hear how everyone thinks these Tweet-aggregator startups are going to do. It seems like every other article on my KillerStartups.com RSS feed is in the space.